How to Install another Hard Drive
 

Want to install a third hard drive on my fedora system, how do I do that? The drive came out of an old pc that had windows nt installed on it. I'm new at this and don't want to delete any current files or drives. I use the machine as a file server and I'm running out of space.

Plug it in, make sure it's detected in your bios, and run 'fdisk -l' as root to see what name it's been given (/dev/hd* if it's IDE, /dev/sd* if it's SATA or SCSI.) You can then use a partitioner (cfdisk for the command line, something like GTKParted for Gnome, if I remember correctly) to format it. You can then read up on how to edit /etc/fstab to get it to automatically mount it when you boot.
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

I am running KDE desktop, looking through the menu I don't see a GUI for formating and mounting the hardrive. I have tried using the cfdisk from the command line but get an error the command is not found. Tried to use fdisk but found the command line version daunting and just about foulied up my system.

Did a web search and found a referrence to qparted but again this resulted in command not found message. I'm running fedora core 4 with KDE desktop, any suggestions?:confused:

for partitioning tools, first try the Fedora package manager (In the GUI menus, it is something like "add/remove software"). You can also download the programs and install manually.

Two very good GUI tools are GParted (comes on a stand-alone bootable CD), and QTParted, which is included in many "liveCD" distros--eg Knoppix)

The terminal program "fdisk" is available in every Linux and possibly the most reliable, robust and versatile partitioning available. It pays to learn how to use it.

The other equally good partitioning tool in root terminal is "cfdisk" which is replaced by "sfdisk" it the distro is from the Red Hat family.

Personally I think a Linux user can learn more and better with terminal programs than those in GUI as far as partitioning is concerned.

Partitioning of a hard disk is a major step in the utilisation of the hard disk and the simpler the instruction/step is better because one wrong move can have a dire consequence. As a starter a user should know partition creation is operated on the unmounted device whereas formatting is operated only after a partition has been mounted. With GUI programs the two are often mixed and done together and so the operation is irreversible.